My dear Bagginses and Boffins, Tooks and Brandybucks, Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and Proudfoots, welcome to a new step in this blog’s sheepishly modest evolution. I have been blogging in the darks for too long, and even though it remains ideal for showcasing photography, I have decided to turn my back to darkness and ease into lighter tones again. Pompously, I named this template Rebirth as a wink to both the new look of the premises and recent events in my life. But with no further delays, I’ll take you for a walk around...

First and foremost, you will have noticed the « Web 2.0 » feel. Unless, that is, you don’t have a clue of what Web 2.0 is, in which case you are still part of a vast majority. Well, let me reassure you, Web 2.0 is not yet-another standard or a another programming language or set of rules. There is nothing hardcoded to be learned, no syntax to master. Instead, we are offered a tendency. A trend. A direction. Almost a philosophy. Web 2.0 simply is the emotional result of over 20 years of web evolution.

The term was first invented in 2004 to describe the emerging use of the World Wide Web and web design as creative and collaborative efforts. Computer users are currently experiencing a migration from their computer-based applications towards a web-based community where information sharing and communications are leading us into a new era. Social networking, wikis, blogs and photo sharing sites are at the heart of Web 2.0. It has become possible to work exclusively online through the use of webmail, messaging and web-based word processors, photo-editors, calendars and the like.

In addition, Web 2.0 marks the end of boring text-only browsing and the appearance of pretty online interfaces that mimic desktop applications, enhancing user-interaction and once again promoting a communication exchange. Surfing the web is now less about reading passively and more about participating and providing input and feedback, in real time.

Of course, to support such improvements, new technologies are being developed and my favorite is AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. To keep things simple, let’s just say that AJAX blurs the line between static web pages and a dynamic information exchange between server and visitor. It for instance allows you, as my visitor, to drag and drop the right sidebar widgets - reordering them as you see fit, or to collapse them by clicking on the Mac-looking green icon, all without the need for a full page reload. It saves you time and makes me popular by improving your experience and allowing for a pleasant visit. Go ahead, try it! It’s fun, and it’s very Web 2.0.

I have kept some of the core functionality of the previous template such as Lightbox 2.0 for all slideshows, because once again it falls into the new trend and because it is just one of the best scripts out there. I finally agree with my « editor » that the photo thumbnails inside posts are too small and will from now on include bigger ones. The template I based this one on was initially created for WordPress and eventually ported to Serendipity. The credits are at the bottom of the page. I redesigned it to follow my inspiration, got rid of the elements that were too obviously Mac-ed and reworked the comment display system to improve a touch on what I had with the dark skin. You can still toggle the comment display instantly (without a time-consuming page reload) with a link at the bottom of each post, or chose to immediately reply or post if you are the first one to do so.

Should this one not be your first choice, the old skins are still available via the sidebar. If you re-arrange the sidebar widgets, your browser will remember your preferences and the next time you visit, it will all be peachy. I have tried to streamline the loading process and cut down a single page’s list to 10 entries. You should experience slightly faster loading times.

Any way, in the end, blogging is not about the envelope, is it? It’s about the content. Right. Well, this IS content, about the envelope. I hope you’ll enjoy both.

A very interesting New York Times article was forwarded to me recently by my own personal Times agent. I read it once, instantly attracted by the familiar topic and friendly location. But by the time I reached the last period, I’d grown uneasy. So I read it twice more. Then I followed the links. And I frowned. And decided to write about it. So here I am.

The article by John Tierney - I’ve read his stuff before, I like him - covers David Blaine’s training for an upcoming attempt at beating the world record of oxygen aided static breath-holding, live on « Oprah ». I must pause here. There are already enough trigger words in this single sentence to get me rambling for hours. Oxygen, for instance. And world record. And Blaine. And live. And definitely Oprah. So I will slow down and backtrack for a second in order to cover the basics and later, I’ll ramble.

Breath-holding, or apnea, is a trend that is probably as old as mankind. Who, as a child, hasn’t tried to push the limits of a single breath, turning red and exploding proudly after fighting the urge to breathe for as long as a kid’s mind could muster? My dad used to challenge us to hold our breath through the tunnels of the Alps. Obelix used it as a blackmailing tool. And it has very practical applications in everyday life, such as enduring particularly nasty cab rides and keeping our love of cats intact even through the toughest litter cleaning episodes.

Eventually breath-holding gets linked to going underwater. As always, we tend to forget our roots, dismiss the exploits of the past and focus on today’s achievements, as they are bound to be greater, shinier, and much better publicized. But ancients were free-diving as far back as 1000 BC and in a less remote past, many civilizations have used free-diving in incredibly dangerous - and often fatal - ways to collect pearls, sponges and coral. Of course, somewhere along the line, surface-supplied diving and later SCUBA (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus) were invented. They instantly sank the limits of what was possible to new depths and durations, and breath-hold - or free - diving was left to adventurers, lunatics, fanatics, romantics and Obelix.

But SCUBA, while mighty amazing in itself, introduced a new set of problems associated with the necessity of breathing compressed air. To name but a couple, the dreaded « bends », or decompression sickness, and nitrogen narcosis. The former is caused by too rapid or steep an ascent from depth after breathing compressed air, which causes the nitrogen dissolved in the body to leave solution and become gaseous again, expanding as the surrounding pressure decreases and wreaking havoc in the blood stream. The latter is a consequence of nitrogen becoming dangerous at higher partial pressures and turning the most reasonable diver into a silly puppet.

So a few purists decided these risks were not only unacceptable, they were unworthy. Free-diving as an elitist activity was born. From immemorial times, mankind has attempted to push the limits of its own endurance. I guess it’s a way of showing off to the Gods, of challenging our own mortality. But the price to be paid is serious, for mortality is a bit of a moody contender. It’ll come sooner if teased, but rarely later. My problem with taking incredible risks in the name of science, honor, challenge, personal growth, ego, money, love or all of the above, is that for each extremely rare individual actually capable of understanding the necessary commitment and the risks involved, there are a hundred who will watch and stare, hypnotized, and without even trying to suffer through the pain of training and the rigors of discipline, they will believe they can do it too, and try. And die.

Our society feeds on sensationalism. The media needs it like we need air to breathe. Without those, no news, no life. But proper care is rarely taken by the media to explain how incredible and extreme such attempts are, and how they should remain the playground of a very small crowd. John Tierney’s article began bothering me when I read, smack in the middle of it, about the author’s own puerile attempt at apnea with a link provided for further investigation. The initial message was, before a bit of my brain was put to work into analysis, « Try this at home, it’s fun. » Not so. It kills.

Then I became even more concerned when I read his description of Blaine’s shallow water blackout on ascent from a training dive to 100 ft. Mr. Tierney proceeds to write: « Mr. Blaine, predictably, seemed untroubled once he recovered. What’s a little blackout to a guy who was once encased in a block of ice for 63 hours? He blamed it on overconfidence (he’d kept going 20 feet deeper than planned) and on his relative inexperience with diving. » Duh! What’s a little blackout? It’s the thing that will kill you if you don’t respect it. On top of that, the guy admits being overconfident and an inexperienced diver. I’m sorry to say that, to me, this makes him a walking corpse. But then again, aren’t we all?

Shallow water blackout, poetically named « Rendez-vous syncopal des 7 mètres » by the French, is a strange contradiction for whoever doesn’t digest hyperbaric medicine papers well for breakfast. Free-divers use controlled hyperventilation to prolong their dives. They carefully decrease the level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the blood while increasing that of oxygen. An extra bonus of oxygen might sound like a convenient commodity for a deep dive, but it’s actually the lowered CO₂ that will be most helpful. Our need to breathe is not really driven by a lack of oxygen but rather by a surplus of carbon dioxide. When there’s too much of it, the brain decides it’s time to inhale. By lowering the initial level of CO₂, a free-diver pushes back the moment when the need to breathe will be irresistible. However, most of these effects being driven by partial pressures, there is a very real danger zone located in the last 20 feet below the surface, where the pressure variation is the greatest; back from the depths, the CO₂ might not yet have reached a level at which it would trigger the need to breathe, but the oxygen could already be so low that the hypoxic brain, sensing the danger, would just shut down the main terminal in an effort to avoid complete hard drive failure. It’s the shallow water blackout. You’re back at 20 feet, your brain is starved for air. You pass out. You might even have an unconscious inhaling reflex. It’s not good. I’d even say, it sucks.

In 2002, French free-diver Audrey Maestre, world record holder and wife of free-diving legend « Pipin » Ferrera, drowned during a dive. I can’t remember exactly what the cause of death was but I think it was shallow water blackout-related. I Googled her. Nothing. The only trustworthy link I can find is one about a subsequent world record by Grand Cayman’s own Tanya Streeter and which briefly mentions Maestre’s death. She has but vanished from official records. Was it worth it? What about him? How does one justify pushing the limits so far that they cost you what’s most precious to you?

Keith was 19 years old. A friend and colleague of my sister, he was working as a dive instructor for Unexso, in Freeport Bahamas. But he had an ego and was blinded by the proximity of masters like Cousteau and Jacques Mayol. He never came up from a free-dive on Theo’s Wreck, and the sea kept his body forever. Sure, he probably died doing what he loved most. But shouldn’t he have lived doing it? It’s so easy to mislead people into thinking that imitating the greatest is all it takes to share their success.

The greatest have one thing in common: years and years and years of practice, gradual exposure, exceptional will power and a profound respect of their craft. And it still kills them. Joe Blow has none of the above, and doesn’t even grasp the concept. But he or she will read the Times and decide it would be very cool to be like that.

Hell, even I feel a tingle in my spine when I hear about the mammalian diving reflex. Who doesn’t want to be closely related to such charming animals as dolphins. Bradycardia caused by immersion of the face in cold water. Sweet. Peripheral vasoconstriction, a shunting of blood flow to the limbs and pooling into the core to sustain basic functions. Cool. I’m a whale... What I fail to consider is that I am about as close to a whale as a mouse to an elephant, and that even the very few human mice who actually exhibit real signs of using the mammalian diving reflex are only closer to the elephant by the length of maybe a whisker.

So when Mr. Tierney sits in a warm Grand Cayman swimming pool (I’m sad to say I couldn’t identify the hotel from the picture) and dips his face in the water for 3:41 minutes, I’m not even sure he actually even involves his mammalian diving reflex which is said to be triggered by cold water face immersion and depth. Oh well, I’m sure it’s worth the price of a plane ticket. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for pushing our own limits. But let’s do so modestly and while acknowledging that those guys are taking awfully big risks. No, let me rephrase that: there should be nothing modest about our own attempts at breaking our personal barriers. Those can be pushed as far and as long as we can invent. But those barriers are our own and need not be copied from others, especially those who seem to have a slight death wish. How about beating ourselves at being the best we can? I believe there’s the real challenge.

I wish David Blaine the best of luck and I hope his world record will never become one for the strangest injury, something like being the first man ever to choke on a microphone on a TV stage while trying to catch his breath. Personally, I think that using oxygen before the event is cheating, not so different from taking a drug. It’s no longer about the inherent capabilities of the human body. And as far as his free-diving goes, I hope he donates some of his proceeds to Duke University or DAN. He might need them.

After bitterly complaining out loud that I never took the time to visit the seawall at sunset any more, I decided this week-end to break the vicious circle and having just come back from my run, I threw the camera bag over my shoulder, got the bike out and left again. The tires were half flat and the frame, seat and gears were covered in a fine layer of drust but it otherwise had survived the winter. In case you’re wondering what drust is, it’s the scar left on man-machines by time itself, a nasty, unavoidable combination of dust and rust. But the bike would at least take me around Stanley Park on a flower recon’; it hadn’t been the explosive bloom of two years ago, but there were flowers everywhere and I knew someone would enjoy the pictures.

It was a chilly evening, Vancouver having decided that the circumspect approach of May is no reason to yield carelessly to the relative warmth of Spring. My woolen hat and gloves were welcome and I zipped up my jacket as high as it would go. I first cut through the West End to go inflate my tires and discovered a heron housing project that I had never seen before, a few paces away from my normal path.

Next I paused briefly around the rose garden to capture some cherry blossoms and other flowers, the roses still shyly being asleep. Then I headed towards Coal Harbour and paid a visit to the nesting white swan on the shores of Lost Lagoon. Just as before, she had obviously decided that her two eggs needed some fresh air and was standing next to them, cleaning herself up, oblivious to my presence. The fence erected around her nest by Park employees is probably a good measure because people are stupid and someone might attempt to make a swan egg omelet - the eggs are quite large, maybe half the size of those of an ostrich - but I must say the swan made a strange choice of nesting site by picking the side of one of the most visited trails in Stanley Park.

Then I pressed on around the Seawall, cut through at the Totem Poles, and arrived at my targeted cherry tree which was completely in the shadows already, a very disappointing fact that sent me on my way around Prospect Point towards Siwash Rock. I would at least get the sunset.

Nothing new there, I had done it so many times, but I always get a tingle down my spine at the view. It’s beautiful, and it’s lonely. For some odd reason, I never managed to take Marie all the way to the rock and it’s a place where I have never been in the company of anybody. Ever. I’ve made wishes there, however. And the main one has come true.

Long after the sun had faded below the the end of the world, I returned in the twilight, meeting a few herons and a raccoon, and a harbour seal that wouldn’t let me even try a picture. No trace of the river otter spotted a few weeks ago, it must have been a fluke. Few people were still out, most having been chased home early by the cold air and the erroneous conclusion that light ends with the sunset. I knew better.

For Marie, in honor of the many amazing books that have contributed to shaping us into who we are, and in memory of our childhood, of which, undoubtedly, the best part is remembering.

In a childish, « I-wanna-do-like-mommy » reaction to many posts about books and reading, I suddenly find myself missing my own books. Looking up and around from the computer, my eyes wander to an annoyingly empty set of shelves and where books should be aligned, there is nothing more than filling - papers and DVDs and things and stuff. The books, you see, were left behind on so many occasions, so many extreme departures, so many radical moves. They were heavy and held me back, they equaled to more than a few suitcases, they were a ball at the end of a chain, despite all the affection I had for them. And so, slowly, I began drifting away from paper; because for some strange reason, I grow attached to good books and resent having to give them away or leave them behind. So I probably figured unconsciously that if I could no longer read, I would write instead.

My love of books goes back so far it becomes blurry and anecdotal. I began, as probably every child ever has, by liking images. But in my young specialist’s mind, the proper ratio of text versus photos had to be achieved in order to make a book valuable. Too much text and my interest was diluted. Too little and I felt cheated of the pertinent information to complement and explain the images. The first serious book I remember being given arrived on my 7th birthday. It was an photo encyclopedia of sharks written by Cdt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau. I treasured it and treated it with the utmost respect, reading it over and over again, learning to differentiate species and slowly understanding that sharks weren’t monsters but animals, like us. I still marvel at the fact that this very book might well have been a trigger and could in part be responsible for the 15 wonderful years I have spent working under the sea.

Then there were a series of even bigger color books on animals. Large format, bright shiny glossy paper and amazing full-page pictures, they were, for many years, the thing I wished for most at Christmas and on birthdays. I would open them only partially to protect the binding and treat them as if their pages had been made of silk, or maybe gold.

Later came a few real encyclopedias, not so elegantly illustrated but whose value and relevance was highly increased in my eyes by the amount of information they contained. This was long before the internet had even been thought of by a few brilliant minds and books were the ultimate source of information; the sense of power and knowledge gained from looking up a complicated word was a high. It was important. It was a ritual, about turning pages, looking up and down lists, selecting, analyzing, digesting, linking to more, and beyond.

There were many imageless books too, at first read out loud to us at bed time, then picked back up on my own and savored many times over. One of those, or rather three of those, were Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy of his childhood memories, Les souvenirs d’enfance: La gloire de mon père, Le château de ma mère, Le temps des secrets. My parents’ copies, which I held on to for so many years, were in a beautiful limited edition, hand cut, numbered in the 3000 range and printed on Velin paper. I have read them so many times I almost know them by heart. They echoed to my own childhood and populated it with healthy adventures and endless games that even the reading of Robinson Crusoe, White Fang, The Last of the Mohican’s and Ivanhoe haven’t matched.

Later as a teenager, I would devour Premier de Cordée and Annapurna, premier 8000, and then run outside and climb up the tallest pine tree in front of the house, anchor my double 8mm rope and repel from the top, using the classic method and burning my bottom and shoulders with sheer enthusiasm and a little too much speed. I would climb up the south face of the villa, hanging on to the window ledges and shutters, cut across to the overhang of the balcony, set my homemade artificial climbing ladders and work my way to the other side, suspended from the roof, pretending to be Gaston Rébuffat on the Drus in the middle of the cruelest storm, with « the bees » flying all around announcing the imminence of lightning strikes.

And here I am, missing all those books and writing about it. The first serious set back to my book collecting happened many years ago when I came back one day from the Caribbean to find that my storage place in Montreal had been broken into and my huge collection of vinyls and books was gone. I learned the hard way not to get too attached to things. But books have a habit of gathering around you any way, and as I attracted more to my shelves, I kept having to deal with departures and systematic change.

Most of what I still own in terms of bound paper and printed prose is now piled up in many boxes, in Beloeil, QC. Some day soon, I hope to finally be able to retrieve them. I wonder what I will think of them after so many years. I used to read mostly in French. It still is my favorite language for literature, even though one must accept that so much is only available in English it would be a shame ignoring it. But will Marcel Pagnol, Maurice Herzog, Reinhold Messner, René Barjavel, Robert Merle, Frison Roche, JRR Tolkien and the others still make me dream and travel in my mind to imaginary places, or have the world of internet and my own travels forever interfered with the inner voyage, and changed the flavor of words into a flavor of images?

Of the many web thinggies keeping me interested in my screen these days, worth mentioning are the following:

• Firefox remains at the top of the pack, slick, fast, free, efficient and most of all, fun! If you haven’t switched yet, you’re falling behind. Its extension possibilities are far superior to anything else that exists right now and allow you to turn your web surfing experience into a cool ride, which it might as well be considering the time we spend doing it! And that brings me to the next topic:
• Gmail Redesigned, a new skin for the rather boring standard Gmail look. It’s basically new CSS for Gmail, running on a Firefox extension called Stylish. Very interesting new look, much darker colors, something I like as you’ll have noticed by the template on this blog.
• Splashup, an online photo editing tool that allows you to retouch or resize your photos on the fly, from anywhere with internet access. No need to have a computer with Photoshop installed, it all happens in real time on the web site, through a VERY slick interface that fully illustrates the power of the Web 2.0 trend and AJAX.
• TED, (no, not the dog!) the Technology, Entertainment and Design web site, featuring videos of talks given by some of the greatest minds of our time at conferences where they are challenged to give the speech of a lifetime in 18 minutes.
• MapMyRun, a cool training tacking site with incorporated Google Maps route design and distance mapping. I haven’t managed yet to embed a run map directly onto the blog because of a conflict between Serendipity and <iframes>, but below is the link to my standard, ever so beautiful Stanley Park run.

Here are, in no particular order, pictures of a recent past that have been sitting in a folder waiting to be published. They show how disconnected I am right now. They’re not even that good. The subjects might be, though. I mentioned in my last post the doubts I am having about the whole blogging process. You don’t have to read on, I’m posting this for myself. These shots make me think. And dream. They remind me of an elusive reality which I am trying hard to materialize these days.

We begin not in Camargue or Greece but Knysna, South Africa.

Then, it’s Park Slope, at the end of a botanical afternoon.

Back to South Africa, somewhere in the Karoo...

Then New York again. If there’s a red phone for presidential emergencies, this must be the yellow phone behind the yellow line for those who have the blues...

But then again, the best remedy to the blues is exercise, no matter where the gym is located. Here, the yellow line of a garbage court of the NYC City Hall. Notice how happy the subject looks. That’s thanks to Momofuku’s Nigori.

Next, botanists obviously have a sense of humor. Interrupted growth? Where is the fern?

But someone has to photograph those rarities. With passion.

Passion being what drives one human up the Skeleton Gorge ladders and a few dogs to the slopes of Table Mountain and Silvermine.

Those are Gin & Tonic cups, by the way.

But the view is usually worth it.

So having sweated all the way up, one decides to freshen up.

Back in New York again, blissful flower bath. And the sweetest picture taken by a very willing butcher in his own store, at his own request - but he must have had a background in tourism.

Answering an email this morning about Tim Farrar’s FFDD, I found myself wondering where time flies. Gone are the days when I could afford to go stroll aimlessly around the Seawall at sunset, night after night, hunting for the one stunning sky that only HDR could render, and then going back home and spending hours at the computer processing and developing lovingly. Gone is my time to write when I feel like it, because I feel like it. I’m neglecting the blog and my creativity is at an imposed all time low. I miss the Little Cayman days when there was basically nothing else to do after work but go play with a friend’s pets, drink, or create - often all of the above. Everybody around me is happily blogging and engaged in a commenting ballet, reading right and left, networking. I can’t keep up. I’m not sure I even want to. It has all become so common, vulgar at times. Soon blogging is going to replace reality TV, feeding people’s morbid desire to peek into one another’s nightmares and dirty secrets. I don’t want to be there when that happens. Or is it too late?

It sounds like a movie title. It isn’t. It was a real Monday night, end of a trip and dawn of a week, as so many things in life morph from one into another... We walked east from Cobble Hill, leaving Henry Street behind and following Union Street towards and past the now ritual Gowanus bridge and its nearby strange sidewalk garden, and on to Park Slope. The air was crisp and we moved briskly, looking around us with pleasure, noticing small things like hints of spring and touches of tasteful caring on doorsteps. We turned right on 5th Avenue and kept going for a couple of blocks to the corner of Caroll. And there it was. The odd little lobby stuck out onto the sidewalk, antechamber of Al di Là’s cavern. As we eased through the outer door, we gave way to a lady stepping out while talking on her cell phone: « I don’t think we should eat at Al di Là, she was saying to someone invisible, there’s an hour wait to get a table. » We looked at each other, incredulous. This was Monday night, not Saturday.

But we pushed in, brushing past the heavy curtains that completely isolate the dinning room from the street, and were immediately immersed into the warm ambiance of the place. There stood Emiliano, greeting us and looking a bit discouraged as he smiled apologetically as if to say: « I know what you are going to ask, and you know what I’m going to answer. » We did know, but we asked any way. The room was buzzing with activity, conversations were loud and happy. « About an hour, he said. It’s so busy tonight. You could wait downstairs. » Neither one of us had brought a phone, but we headed downstairs any way, back outside and around the corner, to the low-ceiling little room they use as an overflow dining room, a bar, and a narrow waiting area.

At first, we felt like the last two onions squeezed into an already tightly stuffed turkey. No way to approach the bar, nowhere to sit, the waitresses looking frantic. But we’d been there before. Soon, as people having arrived ahead of us managed to grab a seat here and there, we were able to order our ritual glasses of Prosecco. Having claimed those, we retreated to a corner by the window and stood there toasting to us, and to them. When a couple sitting at the bar gave clear signals of preparing an exit, we made our move to replace them. But just as we took possession of our 2 square feet of bar space, the word came from above: our table was ready, no later than 20 minutes after we’d arrived. Maybe 15. There was magic in the air. Our drinks took a shortcut via steep inside stairs so that we wouldn’t have to carry them in the street; we walked back outside around the block, through the curtains, into the main dining room and sat down. Sigh. We had arrived.

Al di Là is a tradition. We’ll always come here once in a while and melt. « I love this place, says Marie, it has seen me through a lot, from way back in the beginning. And now you are here. Happy ending. » She is somehow wrong, though, it’s a happy beginning. But she is right to like Anna and Emiliano’s restaurant. There’s something in the air, here. Intangible, but very real. And the food is just superb.

So we picked up our menus and the wine list. Well, the wine is generally Marie’s baby. For my part, I had a rendez-vous with gnocchi and nervously glanced up and down the page, worried they might have disappeared. No, there they were, Malfatti, Swiss chard and ricotta gnocchi with brown butter and sage. I took a deep breath. Choosing a dish to compliment the malfatti was superfluous, but I did any way, because a hangar steak sounded like a funny choice for an Italian resto. Marie made love to her spring salad with peas and pea shoots and then had slow-cooked beef cheeks with green garlic and Jerusalem artichokes. Time flowed slowly, along with a bottle of pino nero. Eating at Al di Là is like embarking on a broken time machine; you know when you arrive but never really know when you’ll leave... In any case, my resolution is now strong. These gnocchi are the best thing I have ever eaten and next time, I’ll order a triple serving and nothing else.

We finished dinner by sharing an affogato di gelato. And then, still hypnotized by the company and confused by such delicious food, I think I messed up the tip. I’m quite happy doing maths while flying IFR but staring into amazing green eyes, it’s a whole other story.

We finally stood up and, having fetched our coats, headed for the door. Emiliano was eating dinner at a small corner table, alone, and gave us a smile and a wave as we were leaving. We waved back. Until next time...

Up at 5:00 am this morning, I looked back lovingly at my awful Grand-Canyon-like bed and sighed. It would be 40 hours until I saw a bed again. I then proceeded towards the kitchen, nailing my foot on the vacuum cleaner abandoned in the door way. Vacuum cleaners - who needs them, really? All I have to do is open the door and the sliding window at the same time to create a draft and all my dust returns to itself. Or the neighbor’s.

But I skipped coffee, still unable to focus sharply on anything smaller than the oven and unsure of my ability to handle Bialetti technology. I would get caffeine downtown. Getting dressed wasn’t so complicated because I’ve learned to execute my routine through the mists of the deepest early morning sleep. Once I figure which sock goes on which foot in order to avoid positioning the holes on the big toe - a wasteful and aggravating maneuver I’ve regretted many a time - the rest follows smoothly. Ok, I’ve only got one pair that’s this bad.

A glance at the outside thermometer to figure out if I could finally focus, a look at the mirror to make sure I was wearing pants, a frown at the open suitcase which by now should have been packed, a handful of dried apricots to get my hands sticky and avoid losing my bus pass, and I was out the door. I caught the first bus at the first stop, along with two or three other early birds and a raccoon. I don’t think they could focus much either.

I got off in front of Waves and went in for coffee. I had a couple of minutes to kill before it turned 6:00 am. There’s something degrading about arriving to work before 6:00; it’s like admitting being a slave, or having slept on the sidewalk. But at 6:01, it all changes. A new workday is born, there’s time and potential ahead and one feels smart by having beaten the crowds to their desk.

I like early morning. It’s a promising time. I wish English had an expression for it like Spanish does. La madrugada. It’s easy to get lost in thoughts, then.

So I sat down for a few minutes in this town of men with big mouths and no guts, thinking that some things we plan, we sit and we invent and we plot and cook up; others are works of inspiration, of poetry; and me, if you can believe this, I closed my eyes, actually praying, not to God above but to you, waiting in your dress, in your dress of blue; saying, thank you girl, thank you girl, I’ll love you till the end of the world...*

* Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - crafted from (I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World